Business
Stanford athlete turned wealth guru had everything he wanted by 30, but was miserable: ‘I had the high-paying job, the title, the house, the car’
Today, Sahil Bloom is a New York Times bestselling author helping everyone from office workers to billionaires re-define their perceptions of success. But being a wealth guru wasn’t what he first set out to do in life; while studying at Stanford University he played for the Ivy League’s baseball team, with a promising athletic career ahead of him. After an injury derailed his MLB dreams, Bloom turned to investing, asking rich people in his circle for professional advice. Less than a decade later, his hustle had paid off.
“By the time I turned 30, I had achieved every marker of what I believed success looked like,” Bloom wrote in his book “The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life. “I had the high-paying job, the title, the house, the car—it was all there.”
However, Bloom quickly realized that money didn’t buy happiness. He had the life most people dreamed of—financial stability, professional accolades, and life’s luxuries—but everything that looked good on paper didn’t translate to a fulfilled life. Something was missing, and Bloom sought to find out what that was.
“But beneath the surface, I was miserable. I began to think something was wrong with me…All I could think was: Is this it?” Bloom wrote, adding that he had erroneously “prioritized one thing at the expense of everything.” Chasing big paychecks over anything else, Bloom was confronted with the reality that money is only one part of the equation. He soon identified four other types of success in building a happy life: time, social, mental, and physical wealth.
Chasing true wealth is about more than money
All it took was one conversation for Bloom to alter his life path radically. An old friend pointed out how little time that he had left with his parents—moments Bloom realized were “finite and countable.” With how infrequently he saw his family, he estimated there might have been 15 more times to be with them before they passed.
“In that moment, I had a realization that my entire definition of success, of what it meant to build a wealthy life, was incomplete,” Bloom told Fortune earlier this year. “That the pursuit of the one thing which we all use, which is money, status, [and] fancy things, was a part of building a wealthy life, but it was not the complete picture.”
Within the next month and a half, Bloom said he would leave his job, sell his house in California, and move 3,000 miles across the country to live closer to both of his parents. They were life-altering decisions, but the change taught Bloom that he had the power to change his outlook on leading a wealthy existence. He was redefining what it meant to be successful in ways that other money books and wealth gurus weren’t exploring yet.
“That one action was really the spark behind everything, because in it was a realization that you are actually more in control of your time than you think,” Bloom continued. “Building a wealthy life is about so much more than just accumulating money and things. It is about time. It is about these other aspects of our lives that we have historically just not had a way to measure.”
On the quest to unravel what it truly means to be wealthy, Bloom set out with the intention to not force an answer on readers like other self-help books often do. Instead, the investor and author sought to challenge his fans to redefine the concept in different seasons of their lives—whether they’re 20, 40, or 60 years old. In February this year, “The 5 Types of Wealth” was published, and it soon attracted an unassuming crowd of devoted fans.
Billionaires and business successes tuning into Bloom’s wealth advice
The world’s richest people were quick to pick up the book, and had a hard time putting it down. Apple CEO Tim Cook, worth $2.6 billion, may not need advice for growing his bank account. But the tech executive called the book “a powerful call to action to think deeply about what lights you up—and a guide for how to build a life of meaning and purpose.” Fellow author and motivational speaker Mel Robbins also described Bloom’s work as “a powerful wake-up call” that will push readers to “rethink everything.” And hedge fund mogul Bill Ackman, sitting on a $9.3 billion fortune, posted on X that “The 5 Types of Wealth” is a “guide to how to live your life…I don’t know of a better return than this book. Read it. You will thank me and Sahil.”
It may be assumed that billionaires would be the last group of people to pick up a wealth guru’s book, but even those with eye-watering net worths crave ways to redefine their success. Happiness goes deeper than one’s pockets. Bloom first discovered this in his 20s, and finding the right balance between all five types of wealth is key to genuine success.
“What the world is going to tell you to do is to chase money over and over and over again. That is the path that leads to a life where you have a lot of the one thing, but you’ve lost out on everything else,” Bloom said. “You measure your entire life’s worth around this one number. And unfortunately, while it is a part of building a wealthy life, it is not the complete picture.”
